learning with professionals - Higgins Counterterrorism Research ...

of law where courses concerning these methods have been offered for over a decade in
several prominent law schools. The present course draws upon the experience gained in
these attempts to provide persons with better methods for making sense out of masses
of evidence. Our view is that these methods represent one very important step in
attempts to close the collection-analysis methods gap mentioned above. These analytic
methods cannot be learned effectively just by listening to lectures about them. Nor can
they be learned by just listening to first-hand accounts of successful analyses or by
post-mortem accounts of analytic failures. They can only be learned by hands-on experience
with collections of evidence whose meaning must be established by imaginative
and critical thought. The major part of this course will involve your performing three
assignments involving collections of various kinds of intelligence data whose meaning
is to be established. The major purpose of these assignments is to help you acquire habits
of imaginative and critical thought that will serve you well when it becomes your
turn to try to make sense out of a mass of evidence in some situation vital to our
nation’s defense. Here is a brief review of our course objectives as they concern the
tasks of evidence marshaling and argument construction.
A. Objectives Concerning the Marshaling of Thoughts and Evidence
On some rare occasions we may be lucky to have what are termed “nuggets”— those
single items of credible evidence that immediately suggest important specific possibilities
or hypotheses to which we ought to attend carefully. If we had been in possession
of such nuggets in advance of September 11, 2001, we might have been able to prevent
the disaster that occurred. In most cases, however, lacking such nuggets, we must mine
and process enormous amounts of “lower grade evidential ore.” In such instances, new
possibilities or hypotheses are generated, discovered or suggested only by examining
combinations of information. Two or more items of information, considered together,
often suggest hypotheses that are not apparent when the items of information are considered
separately. The necessity for considering combinations of information in order
to generate new hypotheses exposes an extraordinarily difficult problem. The number of
possible combinations of two or more items of information increases exponentially
with the number of items we have. Even if we could examine all possible combinations
of our items of evidence, it would not make any sense to do so. This would be the act of
trying to look through everything in the hope of finding something. 262 Here is precisely
where useful methods for marshaling, organizing and combining our thoughts and evidence
become so important.
Intelligence information rarely, if ever, comes to us already organized or marshaled
in ways that immediately suggest new hypotheses or possibilities. Experienced intelligence
analysts adopt a variety of methods for organizing the information they receive or
request. Developing strategies for marshaling our thoughts and evidence that are useful
262 The number of combinations C of two or more items of information, when we have n items of information,
is the number C = 2n - (n+1). When n is just 10, C = 1013; for n = 50, C ≈ 1.3(10)15; for n = 100, C ≈
1.26(10)30.
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